About a Wall

Bowman, Glenn

doi:10.3167/015597704782352672

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…As Dan Rabinowitz has argued, the ‘realities in Israel‐Palestine since 1967 have consistently obscured and obfuscated the demarcation lines between Israelis and Palestinians’, resulting in a renewed ‘quest of Israelis for a border’ (2003: 1; see also Bornstein 2002 a ; 2002 b ). In its most extreme form the contradictions of this process can be seen in the building of the Wall across the West Bank which started in 2003, designed, in the words of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to protect Israeli citizens from ‘becoming the next victims of Palestinian terrorism’, but still leaving Israelis and Palestinians living on both sides (see Bowman 2004; Israel Diplomatic Network n.d.). Throughout the second intifada the ‘quest for a border’ was played out at a micro‐level through the checking of identity documents at checkpoints, producing new and unstable forms of difference.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documented lives: fear and the uncertainties of law during the second Palestinianintifada

Kelly

2006

Royal Anthropological Inst

118

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This article examines the role of identity documents in producing the particular texture of relationships between persons and states in the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. For many people in the region the forms of legal identification they hold are central to their life chances. Considerable efforts are therefore made in trying to accumulate and manipulate documents for political and economic advantage. However, the implications of holding identity documents are always partial and unstable. This article argues that identity documents penetrate into the lives of those who hold them, not as reifying abstractions, but as an unpredictable and unstable technique of governance, producing fear and uncertainty for all those subject to their use. Although the production of identity documents creates a separation between the legal and the physical person, these two aspects of personhood are recombined as, through their anxieties, people come to embody the indeterminacies of the documents that they hold. In this way documents produce legibility and illegibility, stability and instability, coherence and incoherence.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documented lives: fear and the uncertainties of law during the second Palestinianintifada

Kelly

2006

Royal Anthropological Inst

118

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“…Checkpoints are first and foremost extensions of the Judaization, militarization, and fragmentation of Palestinian land, a physical manifestation of the territorial project of Zionist expansion; of, to put it more succinctly, "spacio-cide" (Hanafi, 2009). Checkpoints form part of the matrix of Israeli occupation, or if one prefers, colonialism and apartheid (on apartheid see Davis, 1989;Farsakh, 2003;Peteet, 2009), which includes the wall/separation barrier (Bowman, 2004;Fields, 2010;Misselwitz & Rieniets, 2006;Usher, 2005), Israeli/settler-only access roads (Biesenbach, 2003;Misselwitz & Rieniets, 2006;Weizman, 2007), policies of closures (Hass, 2002), and bureaucratic controls over Palestinian life that includes everything from the doling out of differentiated identification cards and travel permits (Abu-Zahra, 2008;Tawil-Souri, 2010) to the arcane policies of land ownership/confiscation and residency registration (Khamaisi, 1995). Although introduced into the landscape in the 1990s, checkpoints are legacies of the matrix of control and oppression that Israel has been building since 1948, whereby the landscape is reshaped to imprison and squeeze Palestinians and force them to trespass through an ever-shrinking geography of (their own) Palestine.…”

Section: Situating Checkpoints In History and On The Ever-changing Mapmentioning

confidence: 99%

Qalandia Checkpoint as Space and Nonplace

Tawil‐Souri

2011

Space and Culture

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This article analyzes checkpoints in the Palestinian Territories and how they function as both a unique anthropological space and a nondescript nonplace. First, the author describes the birth of modern-day checkpoints, their formations, variations, and functions. Then, based on ethnographic research at the Qalandia checkpoint, halfway between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the author shows how the checkpoint is an economic and social hub and argues that it is an "anthropological space." Qalandia and checkpoints generally can also be theorized as "nonplaces," akin to airports, that are interstitial zones that sever Palestinian space-time. Finally, the author suggests that checkpoints play a central and symbolic role in Palestinian society that bespeaks the core predicament of Palestinian existence within a paradoxical and disordered relationship to geography over which Israel continuously attempts to exert control.

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“…However, when these traditional tactics did not yield results, communities who were set to benefit most from a barrier began to construct one directly on the Green Line themselves using their own funds (Ratner 2002). "Fence for Life" also suggested that it was the influence of various interests outside of immediate government control, such as real-estate interests and settler groups, that were holding up the future construction of a barrier (Bowman 2004).…”

Section: The Rhizome Revealedmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Separation Wall: A Symbol of Power and a Site of Resistance?

Pallister‐Wilkins

2011

Antipode

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This article seeks to address the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism that has developed in response to the building of the separation barrier or what I will term the “Separation Wall” and to argue that the tactics of resistance witnessed are informed by the networks of power bound up in and represented by the physical structure of the Wall. It will aim to draw connections between physical realities and the hidden relations they represent and the act of resistance by suggesting that the Separation Wall offers not only a site of resistance in a world of increasingly invisible and multi‐factorial power, but that the networks of power it represents call for specific forms of resistance. These specific forms focus on direct action over more traditional modes of claim‐making undertaken by state‐based social movements premised on a liberal understanding of representative politics.

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About a Wall

Cited by 8 publications

References 6 publications

Documented lives: fear and the uncertainties of law during the second Palestinianintifada

Documented lives: fear and the uncertainties of law during the second Palestinianintifada

Qalandia Checkpoint as Space and Nonplace

The Separation Wall: A Symbol of Power and a Site of Resistance?

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